Stockholm Electoral Conference - Welcome remarks from Kevin Casas-Zamora

I want to warmly welcome you to Stockholm and to this conference, which brings together electoral authorities from more than 40 countries to address shared challenges and to exchange on solutions and opportunities. It’s a
warm welcome indeed, as we crowd into this room. But the number and diversity of the attendees packed in here today shows the global demand for dialogue on electoral integrity, which has only increased since International IDEA was founded three decades ago.

In these remarks, I want to do three things. First, I’ll share a few reflections on the state of play for elections globally. Second, I’ll give an overview of our Institute’s longstanding engagement with elections, and how that core line of work is evolving. And third, I’ll outline the rest of this session, as well as my hopes for the coming days.
This event is being held on the heels of the greatest round of elections in history, with 1.6 billion people casting ballots in 74 national elections in 2024. 

The so-called super-cycle of elections was a remarkable display of democratic vitality. Yet it also reflected the challenges besetting elections, including disinformation campaigns, political polarisation, gender-based discrimination and violence, voter distrust, election denialism, and the concerted efforts of many authoritarian leaders to appropriate the bedrock of democracy for their own purposes. If one thing is clear from the super-cycle, it is that democratic elections worthy of the name require urgent support and protection globally.

The challenges confronting elections today form part of a broader trend: democracy faces its strongest headwinds since the 1930s. Half of the countries surveyed by International IDEA in 2024 experienced declines in more
attributes of democracy than those that improved. Only one in three had a positive balance in this measure.

To these general trends, add dramatic changes to the context in which elections take place today. In most places, the traditional image of elections, when someone marks a paper ballot in a quiet school-turned-polling station monitored by friendly party observers, has become a thing of the past. Political polarisation, illicit funds, online aggression, and digital disinformation buoyed by obscure algorithms and bots have disrupted elections globally. Election denialism has spread around the world, with politicians from the United States to Peru and from Georgia to Bangladesh using spurious arguments to question credible results.

Trust is the key feature of any effective election. Yet trust in elections is being eroded. A growing number of voters in many countries feel either apathy or scepticism. Global electoral turnout has declined nearly 10 percentage points in the last 15 years, while more doubt is being cast on election results. Around 40 percent of elections in 2024 suffered some form of dispute over their credibility, from legal boycotts to party complaints against the outcome.

Last but not least, environmental hazards are increasingly upending elections. In 2024, at least 20 elections at different levels in 15 countries were disrupted by extreme climate events. Some 30 electoral staff died in India last year from a heatwave, providing evidence of how the climate crisis is tangibly impacting democracy.
However, the threats to elections are only half the story. Equally important is that, despite so many challenges, elections are resilient. Amid broad democratic backsliding, elections continue to offer an opportunity for renewal. In the cases where a country has managed to reverse backsliding—like Poland, Slovenia, Guatemala or Brazil—it happened because of an election.

Democracy can be restored as long as electoral routes for political change remain open. Protecting electoral integrity is thus of the essence if democracy is to live another day. This is a vital task for democracies, requiring whole-of-society coordination and investment. And at the centre of this effort sit election management bodies, or EMBs.

Like many public services—from water to electricity—we too often take the work of EMBs for granted, expecting them to run flawless elections whether we invest in them or not. The reality is that these bodies need support, from governments and societies, to stay independent and innovate in times of radical change and mounting threats.
This is why elections and electoral processes have been at the heart of International IDEA from the very beginning. The central role of our electoral assistance function is reflected in our very name, and it has remained a critical component of our global programming and research agenda to this day. To put it simply, elections are the foundation on which this house is built.

In the past year, we have reinforced our institutional focus on the essential role of elections in democracy. At the start of 2024, we gathered our Council of Member States in this room to look ahead at the unprecedented series of elections last year. We noted that 2024 was a plausible inflection point for democracy: either the year democratic decline accelerated, or the year the tide turned in democracy’s favour. And we observed that the direction of this inflection, and thus the fate of democracy, would be closely tied to the fate of elections—for better or for worse.

With that sense of context and purpose, International IDEA developed and implemented an action agenda squarely focused on supporting electoral integrity through all aspects of our work. We emphasized the urgency of protecting electoral integrity in our global communications and advocacy. We doubled down on our electoral analysis—focusing last year’s Global State of Democracy Report on safeguarding elections, and publishing factsheets ahead of key votes. We launched a new landing page on our website, featuring an interactive map of the world’s elections alongside events, blogs, and news. And finally, we committed to doing all we can to share and reinforce the stories of success and risk that the year would tell. The super-cycle report that our Electoral Processes team just launched is yet another important piece of this commitment.

In that same vein, another dimension of our enhanced agenda on elections has been our series of exchanges among our Member States on various aspects of electoral integrity, which we launched a year and a half ago in
partnership with the Australian Electoral Commission and have sustained into this year with the added support of the Swedish Election Authority and the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. This conference is a keystone event in that ongoing effort to encourage and facilitate dialogue around electoral issues across our Member States.
The enthusiasm with which this initiative has been received is nothing short of inspiring. Many of you, and many of your colleagues, have participated in these exchanges, which have revealed tremendous examples of determination and innovation by electoral managers in confronting a growing array of challenges. These cases are not just good stories, they are very practical guides for action, and they speak to the value of our Institute’s comparative, inclusive, and intergovernmental approach.

Driven by this success, we are now leveraging the model of exchange among EMBs into other areas via our Democracy Exchanges for Member States initiative. We began this expanded effort last year with a series on gender equality, which we delivered with support from Luxembourg. We hope to do much more of this in future, convening exchanges among Member State institutions beyond Ministries of Foreign Affairs, to address a broad range of issues relevant to democracy today and in the future.

The heightened emphasis on facilitating pluralistic exchange underscores International IDEA’s value as a platform for dialogue and coordination. This conference is a case in point. I know that each and every one of you is
here because you believe the discussions you will be part of in the coming days are important, indeed necessary, and because you know that complex global problems can only be solved by working together. Well, when it comes to democracy, International IDEA is your go-to forum. Our unique combination of thematic expertise, globally diverse membership, and convening power make us ideally placed to help governments and institutions find collaborative pathways towards a sustainable democratic future.

This event aims to do just that when it comes to electoral integrity. The conference gathers the global electoral community to share and leverage lessons and success stories from elections around the world—whether civic education programs in South Africa, cost-effectiveness at massive scale in India, or effectively promoting women’s
political participation and representation in Mexico. Each of these initiatives was developed in a specific national context, but each has relevance for the broader community. Here, we will all learn from each other’s experience.

We will all benefit from each other’s wisdom. We will all help ensure that election management is fit for the risks of the present, and ready to seize the opportunities of the future. The event will culminate in the Stockholm Consensus on Electoral Integrity, a document that will highlight the essential work of EMBs to a global audience while laying out a robust agenda of action for the future of election management and assistance.
This event, and International IDEA’s work overall, would not be possible without the support of our Host Country and Founding Member State, Sweden. I am grateful to the Swedish Election Authority and its Head Anna Nyqvist for their crucial partnership on this conference. I also want to thank the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs for their stalwart support of International IDEA throughout our three-decade history, including this conference and the associated celebration of the Institute’s 30th anniversary.

I now have the great honour of welcoming Dag Hartelius, Sweden’s State Secretary for Foreign Affairs, to share opening remarks. After that, my colleague Leena Rikkilä Tamang, International IDEA’s Regional Director for Asia and the Pacific, will moderate an outstanding panel of electoral leaders from India, Mexico, and South Africa. I look forward to hearing from them, and to your questions and reflections from your own experiences. The insights shared here will help inform our collective efforts tosupport electoral integrity, as a core element of our shared mission to achieve and protect democracy for all.

The Czech playwright Tom Stoppard, who lived through the occupation, liberation, and democratization of his home country, once said that “It’s not the voting that’s democracy, it’s the counting.” To that I might add, it’s also the informed voter, the well-designed ballot, the open nomination, the inclusive voting, the safe polling station. Although democracy is more than elections, of course, there is no democracy without credible elections, and there are no credible elections without robust Election Management Bodies. That’s why your collective work is so important. That’s why we’re here today.

Once again, I deeply appreciate your presence in Stockholm. My friends, thank you for showing up when electoral integrity and democracy needs it the most.

Mr. State Secretary, welcome to the podium.